Tuesday, 13 November 2012

Youth Employment in Times of Crisis

Youth unemployment in Europe has reached unprecedentedly high levels. In some countries, close to a half of young people are without a job. These rates are twice or even three times as high as those of the entire working population.

We are all painfully aware that unemployment and precarious working conditions seriously affect the life of each and every individual and that young people are especially vulnerable in this regard. Young people today face difficulties in entering the labour market and are often faced with precarious working conditions and atypical working contracts (e.g. unpaid internships or self-employed based contracts) facing difficulties in having a stable job. This has a serious effect on their lives and prevents them from becoming autonomous and be fully integrated in the society.

That is why the European Youth Forum has decided in its Strategic Priorities for 2013-18 to focus on youth autonomy and inclusion of young people in Europe. Our understanding of youth autonomy as “the situation where young people have the necessary support, resources and opportunities to chose to live independently, to run their own lives and to have full social and political participation in all sectors of everyday life, and be able to take independent decisions.” (see YFJ Policy Paper on Youth Autonomy, document 0052-04).

The issues related to youth employment will continue to be in the forefront of the advocacy work of the Youth Forum. We already have the policies developed based on the participatory and inclusive process in which we adopt positions within our platform. We had the discussions on the terminology that we use and what we understand with the different concepts. E.g. when the Youth Forum is talking about “quality jobs” it is using this terms in opposition to precarious work situations, to unpaid internships and in line with the believe that the right to decent work should be respected and that young people are particularly affected by ending up having shity first jobs that influence their future career. In summary, we talk about "quality employment" and how quality education and a good transition from education to the labour market is key in this regard.

What we need to do now is to continue advocating and pushing for the realisation of such initiatives as a European youth guarantee scheme that could help cater for the needs of young people facing unprecedented hardship across our continent. We need to continue the excellent work on promoting the European Charter on Quality Internship and Apprenticeships among all relevant stakeholders, including business like we did with Microsoft signing up to it yesterday in Brussels (see story here).

In its Position Paper on Youth Entrepreneurship, the European Youth Forum affirmed its belief that young people deserve the chance to impact on society, as well as to create stable futures for themselves, via the means of enterprise. However, youth often find themselves disadvantaged, especially when attempting to embark on entrepreneurial endeavours. The lack of finances and resources available, as well as an unfortunate and devastating lack of support from educational and governmental structures means that young people often find entrepreneurship a sector simply too difficult or even impossible to break into. Youth entrepreneurship is thus not a magical solution that will automatically unleash the creative and innovative potential of young people. But it is important to ensure and promote proper education and information on the possibilities offered by youth entrepreneurship, to advocate for a common European framework that helps promote youth entrepreneurship without putting young people at even more risk and to demystify entrepreneurship as something negative.

The Youth Forum in its next mandate will have to focus on where is the added value it can bring to youth employment related issues. We need to make an assessment of what can and should be done by the Forum directly and where we can and should work better together with our member organisations. The Youth Employment Action consortium has proven a great tool to exchange good practices and foster new ideas between members from both pillars of the Forum. As such it can even serve as an inspiration for other future working structures in the Forum. The work of the YEA should continue and the consortium enlarged with new members.

Moreover, there will be a big need for coordinated action between the Forum and the National Youth Councils in specific crisis-hit countries to ensure the policy measures taken at European level are translated into concrete action at national, regional and local levels. We have witnessed during this year that the European Council and European Commission have made bold statements on how unused funds have been reallocated to member states to help them fight youth unemployment but when we tried to get clarity on how, when and what exactly we didn't get any answer. On the contrary, we got some ministers telling us there was no such thing in their country as they didn't need help. So it is our task to continue monitoring and scrutinising the implementation of the commitments made by all the relevant stakeholders in this.

If re-elected I want to help stir this process and ensure we have internally a cross-sectorial approach to all issues related to youth employment and to continue presenting a coherent set of measures and proposals coming from the young people and their representatives towards decision-makers. And to listen and be alert to the demands of young people on the streets of European capitals to better understand their needs, their suggestions and try to translate that into the policy language and advocacy for which the Youth Forum has the know-how and capacity to do and thus implement its mission to empower young people to participate actively in society to improve their own lives, by representing and advocating their needs and interests and those of their organisations.